Disney employees dissent as Jimmy Kimmel gets caught in ABC affiliates' machinations

Disney reportedly wants to get Kimmel back on the air, but the political machinations involved may not allow it.

By Mary Kate Carr | September 19, 2025 | 1:18pm

Screenshots: Jimmy Kimmel Live!; The White House (YouTube)

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Disney employees dissent as Jimmy Kimmel gets caught in ABC affiliates' machinations

Disney is reportedly in talks with Jimmy Kimmel to get his show back on the air. But the political agenda to have him fired existed before Charlie Kirk was killed, and the pressure to get rid of him for good is likely to continue. As when Paramount canceled The Late Show after its merger with Skydance, Nexstar took up Trump’s crusade against Kimmel while pending FCC approval for a merger with Tegna which will “extend the company’s combined reach into 80% of American homes,” per NPR. (Nexstar has denied being influenced by the FCC in its decision to pull Kimmel.) Sinclair Broadcast Group, which also owns many ABC affiliate stations, joined the boycott after FCC chair Brendan Carr posted on Twitter/X that he hoped “other broadcasters follow Nexstar’s lead.”

According to reporting from The New York Times, Nexstar and Sinclair’s motives aren’t necessarily purely political. The move can also be interpreted as a power play in their business dealings with Disney. “Local station groups want to maximize profits from the fees that they are paid by cable and satellite operators to carry their programming. But networks like ABC, which sell programming to those stations, want a bigger cut for themselves,” the outlet explains. “The decision to pre-empt Mr. Kimmel may have amounted to Nexstar and Sinclair sending a message as a tough negotiator, [John Chachas, the founder of Methuselah Advisors, a boutique mergers and acquisitions firm] said.”

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Disney may be one of the most powerful entertainment conglomerates in the world, but an affiliate rebellion is a serious threat. “This isn’t just about Jimmy Kimmel Live. It’s about all of ABC and all of the shows and all employees,” a source “privy to ongoing conversations at the company” explained to CNN about the pressures stemming from Carr’s campaign against the company.

Yet giving in to this financial and political pressure creates more issues for Disney. Kimmel allies and free speech advocates have decried the suspension, including Lost‘s Damon Lindelof and She-Hulk star Tatiana Maslany. According to Deadline, employees within the company have compared the situation to the previous CEO Bob Chapek’s bungled response to Florida’s 2022 Parental Rights in Education Act law. “The reaction is like ‘Don’t Say Gay on steroids,” an exec told the outlet. Another said, “This is not how we thought Bob [Iger] would handle this. Senior people told him this is not what we should be doing. It’s such a betrayal.” But with numerous firings across the country stemming from responses to Kirk’s death, Disney employees are keeping their dissent away from internal communication methods out of fear of reprisal, Deadline reports.

“Everyone deeply values” Kimmel and “wants him to come back. But he has to take down the temperature,” a Disney source told CNN. Yet even if he did, it might not solve the problem. “Regardless of ABC’s plans for the future of the program, Sinclair intends not to return Jimmy Kimmel Live! to our air until we are confident that appropriate steps have been taken to uphold the standards expected of a national broadcast platform,” Sinclair said in a statement. The company called for Kimmel to not only apologize, but to make a donation to Kirk’s family and to Turning Point USA. Given Kimmel’s stated values, it’s unlikely that he’d give Turning Point any money, but that’s probably the point: These entities don’t want Kimmel back on the air, they want him shut out for good. And the president has already moved down the list to Jimmy Fallon and Seth Meyers, “two total losers, on Fake News NBC,” he wrote on Truth Social. “Their ratings are also horrible. Do it NBC!!!”

“Disney’s suspension of Jimmy Kimmel is what happens when the government allows decades of media and tech consolidation. When control of media and tech are in the hands of a handful of companies, it becomes easier for authoritarian leaders to control them,” Gigi Sohn, a former senior advisor to the FCC under President Obama, wrote on Twitter/X. Experts interviewed for NPR agreed that there is a concrete legal case to be made for a First Amendment violation, but Kimmel may not wish to pursue it. “In some sense, it almost doesn’t matter if they’re right in the law, because, on the ground, they’re achieving the censorship of protected speech, which is their goal,” Alex Abdo, litigation director of the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University, told the outlet. “The truth is Kimmel’s voice is silenced and the voice of others will likely be silenced.”